When we purchased the house, it was three contradictory apartments belonging to one person,” says the owner of a Greek Revival town house in New York City. “The top was a Swiss chalet and the bottom a traditional American home—with a tenant in the middle. And before that, it had been divided into six.”

The clients’ mandate to architects Peter Shelton and Lee F. Mindel, partners in the firm Shelton, Mindel & Associates, was to redesign the residence for a burgeoning young family without losing its handsome classical features or historical integrity. They wanted it to suit a modern lifestyle and large-scale entertaining and have “all the benefits contemporary architecture has to offer.”

The clients had selected Shelton and Mindel for their first project together, a country house in upstate New York, because, paradoxically, of the way the architects approached urban space. “This second project put us all in our element,” says the wife, “although a Greek Revival house was not our immediate choice.” But the proportions of the rooms in the larger-than-average town house, with its engaging front-to-back symmetry and high ceilings, coupled with the character of the neighborhood, swayed them in that direction.

Shelton and Mindel responded to the brief by first removing botched additions (the residence had been renovated extensively three times, in the 1880s, 1940s and 1980s), painstakingly restoring the original structure. They gutted the top two stories and excavated downward to enlarge the kitchen and to establish a lower garden area. Says Mindel, “It was archaeology—then architecture.”

“The changes and additions aren’t visible on the street façade,” says Shelton, describing the sensitive alterations that were needed. The rooftop modifications were set back on the street façade so as not to intrude on the street’s historical cohesion. Largescale windows on an upper level bring light into the north-facing rooms and integrate the views of the paved gardens below, described by Mindel as “the garden at MoMA meets the Tuileries through the eyes of Man Ray.”

But what is most curious about this magnum opus lies within the main levels of the structure. Seemingly one of the most modern elements of the house, the elongated vertical window at the rear, which spans the three lower stories, had its inception in the 1830s. “This was originally a double-height long window onto the dark servants’ stairwell,” explains the project architect, Michael Neal. Now the interior space has been reapportioned so that the window illuminates the house through to the front on all three floors. “We wanted to recall the past throughout, and here we merely extended the idea,” he says of the window’s reconstruction, “and used different material for the frame—bronze-painted steel—to bring it up to date.”

Entrance to the house is through the light-flooded hall on the first floor or down basement steps, which lead to the service entrance. The formal dining room is at basement level, “with little light or connection to the outdoors,” Mindel remarks. “It becomes its own world of fire.” White-hot Castiglioni chandeliers illuminate the deep red room. Even the custom-made rug incorporates flame motifs, and a bold mirror by André Dubreuil adds a neo-Gothic touch.

Behind the dining room, the kitchen leads to a sitting room, which looks out to the lower garden through a curtain wall of bronzed steel and glass. The sitting room’s roof, of sandblasted glass, doubles as a terrace for the floor above. “The color and texture of the Cinza slate is similar to that of the sandblasted glass,” says Mindel, pointing out that a seamlessness of finish and texture throughout the house gives the impression of continuous flow.

On the parlor level above are the two grandest rooms, where the house’s classical features are a backdrop for a collection of fine mid-twentieth-century French furnishings—club chairs by Ernest Boiceau, tables by Gilbert Poillerat, a curved bench by Emilio Terry and lamps by Jean-Michel Frank. None of these are family heirlooms. “The clients are young and wanted this to mark the beginning of their lives, so we had the opportunity together to create an entirely curated space,” explains Mindel. Every object was selected specifically for the house and to suit the clients’ personalities. Rugs were custom-designed with the clients: “We handpicked every thread to give a sophisticated color base,” says the wife. “The carpets ground the whole interior scheme.”

“It was archaeology—then architecture,” Mindel says of the renovation.

On the two floors reserved for bedrooms, there is more simplification, greater serenity, even less fuss. With a sitting room to the front and the bedroom to the rear, the master suite is a symmetrical experience, highlighted by a pair of free-form white chandeliers sprouting from ornamental ceiling roses in the center of each room. The rectilinearity of the millwork is offset by curvilinear modernist furniture and objects, including, in the sitting room, club chairs and a desk lamp by Frank and, at the other end of the suite, a top-stitched-leather desk Frank designed for Hermès and a transparent bucket chair by René Coulon and Jacques Adnet.

Primary color is again explored, by way of a red leather Frank armoire and red Adnet lamps, on the children’s floor, one story higher. From there, a minimalist glass-and-bronzed-steel staircase marks the beginning of the switch to the ultramodern. Maple millwork spans the family room, which, thanks to its form and the extensive windows and skylights, appears to float above the garden treetops. A maple central core, containing a second kitchen, acts to partition the rear from the front, a continuation of the family space that doubles as a guest suite. A bath backs onto the kitchen as part of the central core.

Finally, up another floor to the top of the house, the angled roof over the office focuses northern views of the skyline above the trees. The office, with its plaster walls, maple cabinetry and bronze-painted steel window frames, has a sitting area that is home to a few later modernist expressions, including a pair of white vinyl chairs designed in 1958 by Charles Eames as “architecture in miniature.”

The casual central sitting area and the south terrace at the apex of the house further integrate the indoors and outdoors, a harmonious finale to a complete work of art. “We had a party for three hundred downstairs while sixty-five children watched Peter Pan over buffet food upstairs,” says the husband, as if the event proved effortless—the impression the house gives about its own restoration and refurbishment. “Actually, the house took two years and felt like a full-time job for me,” notes the wife.

“It used to be that this kind of architecture went two ways,” says Lee Mindel. “Either there was a confrontational kind of modernism appearing next to a historic prototype, or there was a retro modernism that tried to glue in. In this case, we made an effort to combine the restoration with the clarity of the modernist vocabulary, but in a way that didn’t allow the modernist vocabulary to overshadow the restoration. You know it’s a new insertion, but it doesn’t try to be something old,” he concludes. “You remain conscious of our time.”